


Dating Karkat Vantas

by Talliara



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, F/M, Gen, Trolls As Humans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-26
Updated: 2011-06-26
Packaged: 2017-10-20 18:03:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/215608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Talliara/pseuds/Talliara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>... is not without its difficulties. [A collection of musings by Terezi Pyrope. Trolls-as-humans AU. WARNING: Implied child abuse/neglect]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dating Karkat Vantas

**Author's Note:**

> This fic sprung from my own somewhat dark trolls-as-humans au headcanon musings, and took off from there. WARNINGS FOR: Implied child abuse/neglect and a murder. It doesn't particularly focus on the abuse aspect so much as the relationship aspect. These are more or less ideas I wanted to put down in a somewhat organized manner to share, without diving into a novel-length story I don't have the experience to pull off. My knowledge of child abuse stems from research only: if anything I have portrayed here is a grave misconception, please DO call me out on it. The human!Karkat in this story is characterized in the same way I would characterize canon!Karkat- I've always felt that if Karkat had ever been human, those feelings of self-loathing and anger could easily have been attributed to an abusive childhood.
> 
> On a more lighthearted note: Tally, when are you going to stop writing dumb, corny, self-indulgent AU shipfic? In my defense, it is my birthday and I can write dumb, corny, self-indulgent AU shipfic if I want to. No, it really is. I am celebrating with bacon cheeseburgers and I guess really terrible romantic cliches. This is a bad fic with a bad title and I will regret posting it in the morning.

Karkat Vantas is the most fucked up kid you know.

He's an asshole to literally everyone he knows. He's perpetually ornery, impossibly neurotic, and twitchier than an angry cat. His paranoias are many. He is an insomniac and a complete nervous wreck.

You simply adore him.

You think his quirks are cute. You like his shaggy, unkempt hair and his flinty grey eyes. You like how adamantly he demands the attention of the peers he so claims to despise. You like how easily clever insults roll off his tongue. You love how he'll lose his temper and all of that verbal adroitness will disappear, leaving him flabbergasted and tongue-tied. You love how sometimes, he'll keep his cool, and effortlessly counter the insults thrown his way, truthfully caustic. You love how easy it is for you to make him blush.

You love him because Karkat Vantas needs to be better accustomed to being loved. Because maybe, if you spend enough time with him, you can keep him out of trouble, and if you do that, he won't end up in another foster family some few towns or states over where you'll never see him face-to-face again. Because maybe if you love him hard enough you can convince him that it's something he deserves.

When he moved to your town a year ago, you never would have guessed you'd be where you are now. It was his sweatshirt that caught your eye- fire engine red is your favorite color, and Vantas wore it like the brightly colored bands on a particularly venomous snake. When you noticed him huddled in the corner at the back of your global history class, you had to introduce yourself. You didn't get two sentences in before he told you to fuck off, and thus, you began your campaign of harassment.

You initially did it to tick him off. You'd never met anyone more rude in your life. He had a hair-trigger temper. You tried to see how long you could press him before he would explode in a fury. More often than not, he'd end up kicked out of class. He hated your guts, but it was more attention than he was receiving from anyone else.

Karkat kept to himself. Unsurprisingly, he had no friends- none at all. He sat alone at lunch, was always at the back of the classroom, the last to arrive and the first to leave. His attire changed no more drastically than the pair of jeans he wore and the (typically dark-colored) hoodie he concealed himself in. He always wore the hood up.

He did, however, acquire a large number of enemies. Nor did he particularly mind them. Vantas held a passive grudge against virtually everyone, he wasn't about to go out of his way to nurse just one in particular- so long as you weren't going out of your way to get on his nerves. Most people were content to let him be, but on the rare occasion that they weren't- that they deliberately sought him out after school hours for petty vengeance for whatever perceived injustice he'd done them- Vantas gleefully exploited the opportunity to prove he wasn't all bark and no bite.

The bruises and stitches and sour looks of his would-be opposition told you that Vantas a was lot more bite than he looked. That was when the intrigue set in. A nasty-spirited delinquent who was more competent than he appeared, Vantas could hold his own in a schoolyard brawl or even a debate. He was a bad boy. It was scandalous.

Rumor spread like wildfire. Karkat Vantas had a juvenile criminal record a mile long, Karkat Vantas had been expelled from his last school for punching someone's lights out, Karkat Vantas was a meth addict, Karkat Vantas was psychotic. It was simply better not to associate oneself with him. The rumors only heightened your interest. You liked the air of mystery that surrounded him. You set out to see how many of those rumors were lies.

Karkat had no problem with letting you know that they were all bullshit. Except for the one about punching someone's lights out, and that fucker had deserved it, but no, he hadn't been expelled. You always expected there was a little more truth to each than he let on, but at that stage of your relationship there was simply no prying it out of him. But you were patient. Patient, and insatiably curious.

If you asked enough times, sometimes he would tell you things- just little things- about himself. More often, he would tell you to 'fuck off and mind your own goddamn business'. When you ran out of things to tease him about, you would make small-talk, poking fun at other classmates, which was something he enjoyed as much as you did. Occasionally, when you were feeling particularly charitable, you'd correct him on the homework. He consistently refused your help, but you knew he changed his answers when your back was turned.

The exact point at which your taunts and his snarled ripostes gave way to good-natured banter is indistinct, but the day he asked for your name, you knew the dynamics of your relationship had changed. It was probably because you were the only one who bothered to talk to him at all; the unavoidability of interacting with you every day. He preferred your abuse to what he perceived as the idiocy of his other peers, and to the loneliness of his self-imposed solitude.

You began to walk to class together, amiably spending the time mocking passerby. The two of you turned more than a few heads, the weird freak and the biggest douche in school, getting along. It figures, they would say, that they'd be attracted to one another. What can you say? Your personalities are complimentary. Your friends had mixed reactions, and it didn't help that Karkat had no interest in making a good impression on them.

He hit off a near-instantaneous rivalry with Sollux that would have been funny if you hadn't been afraid they were going to duke it out right there in the hall. Vriska didn't care one way or the other, but never missed an opportunity to irritate you, if it would get your attention (she'd never quite gotten over not being your Best Friend anymore; it just went to show you that you'd done right by kicking the backstabbing bitch to the curb). Tavros shied away from Karkat entirely, Aradia approved of you for befriending the troubled boy, and Nepeta was quite obviously besotted with him.

Karkat did not trust easily. He revealed details of his past to you in tantalizing bits and pieces, in off-handed comments and the occasional slip of the tongue. If you pressed him too hard, he would shut himself off to you entirely. You knew the time would come when he would tell you his secrets more freely, but until then, he sated your curiosity on these tidbits of information. Intimacy between you was slow to bloom. You began to suspect that this was the first truly reciprocal friendship Vantas had ever developed.

You took to hanging out at the library together, often with your other friends tagging along. In time, even Sollux grew to at least tolerate Karkat's constant presence in your circle of friends. Despite his stand-offish demeanor, you suspected the hacker liked your new friend a good deal more than he let on. Karkat even seemed to take a special interest in Sollux's coding hobby, sneaking glances at the other boy's monitor from over his shoulder, hovering just behind his chair, until one day Sollux surprised him with a smirk and a cheeky, 'Like what you thee?'

It ended in the most impressive verbal showdown of lewd implications you'd even borne witness to.  
(They've been inseparable ever since).

It was still months before he considered himself a part of your group, accompanying you without invitation. It was later still before he first asked you, if you weren't doing anything later on after school, if you felt like hanging out by the park or whatever? And you accepted.

When it was just the two of you together, Karkat was different. He was still the same ornery asshole as always, but a significantly less convincing one. His insults weren't as sharp. He was less prone to random fits of rage. He was... surprisingly soft-hearted. You've never met anyone with a more passionate interest in terrible movies- and romantic comedies, no less. You'd never have guessed; he kept this side of himself so well hidden. It was cute.

Without your peers around to judge, he was more willing to open up to you. Impressive as his carefully crafted facade was, you liked this less-abrasive side of Karkat Vantas the best.

Maybe even loved it.

'Happy' seemed to be an emotion that Karkat actively avoided feeling, but wasn't immune to. It was a game, getting him to give you even the smallest upward quirk of the lips. You don't think you'd ever seen him wearing a sincere smile. You managed it on your third outing together, and you had never been so obscenely happy in your life. And that was when you made your admittedly impulsive decision: you were going to kiss that boy. And you did.

In those initial few moments where he did nothing but sit there in wide-eyed shock, you feared you had just made the worst decision possible. This humiliating train-wreck of a failure would forever be an ugly blemish on your friendship, if there was anything left of it. Then he kissed you back, tentatively at first, then more boldly, and your concerns were washed away in a tide of relief and affection.

Neither of you formally announced that the two of you were together, not even to yourselves, but it became common knowledge within a week. And no one was particularly surprised.

Dating Karkat Vantas is not without its difficulties- more than you can count, but luckily not any you weren't at least somewhat prepared for when you jumped headlong into this relationship. You've never been in a relationship before, and neither has he, but what you have is nothing like what you see amongst your fellow students at school or on tv. For one thing, Karkat abhors public displays of affection. That doesn't bother you all that much, to be honest. You never wanted to be that overly obnoxious couple sucking face in front of the nerdy kid's locker; those were the sort of people you mocked.

Still, you wouldn't mind being able to at least hold hands with him in public sometimes without there having to be a whole damn spectacle. The first time you leaned in for a kiss in the halls, he shied away, very vocally claiming it was too fucking intimate to be doing in public what the hell is wrong with you? The way you got him to relent was by proving to him that his only other alternative would be significantly less appealing. You swear, you could taste how red he blushed (but mostly he tasted like skin).

Dates usually involved bad movies and lots of snuggling, or what started off as a harmless movie-date would devolve into some impulsive adventure that sent the two of you half-way across town, performing pranks or stupid stunts or retrieving food or movies from the rental store. Sometimes you'd stop by a friend's house to drag them along. More often, though, it would just be the two of you at your house, curled up together on your sofa, talking about everything and nothing. And the more you talked, the more you learned.

It was funny. When you'd first met him, you'd been more intrigued by his past than by anything else about him. And now, knowing the Karkat you did was enough. You loved him more than the mystery that drew you to him in the first place. Maybe that was what he had been waiting for, why he finally fully opened up to you, and eventually told you everything.

Karkat Vantas and his father never got along. He'd never known his mother well enough to care that she was gone, but his father refused to let her go. He'd found temporary solace in other women, but they were never quite her. It was a steady decline, because if it hadn't been, Karkat figured he wouldn't have lived long enough to see it through to the end. His father had always been fond of liquor, and, well. Her absence made his heart grow fonder. When he was old enough, Karkat spent most of his time outside the house. It had initially just been a way of avoiding his father when he didn't care to be around him, but it would soon evolve into a necessity.

School was his haven, for a time. The real trouble didn't start until he'd entered the fifth grade. That was when his father had decided that the reason he continued to find himself alone was because he had a son. No one wanted a man with baggage. Pretty soon, everything seemed to be Karkat's fault. When he couldn't hide the bruises, teachers and peers would start asking questions. And when they asked too many, Karkat would disappear for a few days until they were forgotten about.

He spent a lot of his time on the computers in the public library. He practically lived there, at times. He returned home when he hoped his father was asleep- and he wasn't always, but the library had to close sometime. He learned to be self-sufficient. He took care of himself, and usually his father as well. He did what he could around the house. He scrounged food up wherever he could get it when it wasn't available at home. Sometimes that meant stealing it, or just bumming snacks or meals off a friend- which he didn't have many of. Sometimes it meant going hungry, but he survived.

He couldn't keep it up for long, and eventually it all became too much. The day he turned eleven, he gave it all up. His only priority, he reasoned, should be himself. His father could go to hell. The only time he returned home anymore was to sleep. He was lucky if his father was sleeping, too. The longer he stayed away, the angrier the man was on his return. And so, the longer Karkat would stay away. At friend's houses, outside in warm weather, in vehicles. He was an expert on these things. He still went to school, to give himself something to do, even if his grades were atrocious. Friends were immensely useful people.

Then, when he was thirteen, Karkat Vantas met a man who called himself Spades Slick. He said he thought he had a lot of potential. Slick headed a notorious mob of four, and had a background similar to Karkat's. He admired the boy's tenacity, his character. He was a hard man to please, but Karkat managed. When he fucked up, which happened on occasion, it was no fault save his own. Slick's anger was perfectly justified, Karkat knew, and jumped into his next task with renewed effort. He never screwed up the same job twice.

He learned a lot from Slick. The man had made him tough, taught him to endure, to survive. He was the first person Karkat had ever admired. It was preferable to look up to a man that he could please some of the time than to one he couldn't please at all.

Slick thought he was doing the kid a favor. He'd given him the chance to do it himself, like he had when he was his age. But the kid just couldn't pull the trigger. So Slick did it for him. It should have made him happy, but it hadn't. He didn't know why. All he knew was the anguish of losing his only living relative, and the inexplicable pain of that severed attachment, no matter how tattered it had been. He turned the gun on slick, instead.

Slick let him know just how ungrateful of him it was to do that. And even as Karkat tried not to bleed out there on the floor beside his guardian, he only felt disappointment in himself. He'd blown it, the one good thing he'd had in his life. Slick would never take him back.

The neighbors asked a lot of questions when he showed up at their door. So did the cops, and the paramedics (who he couldn't answer anyhow), and the doctors. He lied to them all, and they probably knew, but he didn't care. He would never betray Slick. He'd been acting out in self defense; he'd stolen the gun from his father's closet in the hope of deterring another attack, but in his father's inebriated state he was quite intent on killing his son. So he'd fired. It was what he'd planned to do initially, anyhow. After a while, they stopped asking.

Of course, the story didn't end there. He wished it had ended there. Oh, there was legal bullshit to deal with after that, court and child services and enforced therapy, but that he endured too. Eventually, they found and convicted Slick, even though Karkat had stuck to his story, even on the witness stand. He'd been sentenced to five years and was presently incarcerated in the state prison. The rest of Slick's crew disappeared entirely.

It was a fantastic, revolting story. You weren't sure you believed it. You didn't want to believe it. You didn't, until you saw the scar, purely by mistake- skin on his midsection revealed as he slipped out of his hoodie one day- a long, ugly, pale slice in his abdomen which made your heart jump to look at. So intrigue gave way to pity. You could only feel ashamed of yourself for ever having been so eager to know.

It took two tries to find a foster home that stuck- or rather, one Karkat didn't adamantly reject. His present foster father was, as he described him, the biggest fucking idiot in the history of humanity. He was entirely too cheerful, zealously supportive, annoyingly affectionate, and an avid prankster. Karkat habitually checked doorways for buckets of confetti or rubber critters.

The weirdest thing about the man was his strange aversion to baking, despite his frequent compulsion to do so. A week didn't pass without a cake in the fridge, and he never ate any himself. It was forced on guests and friends and coworkers and door-to-door salesman, but it was generally up to Karkat to make it disappear. Karkat actually didn't despise cake, as he'd rarely had a chance to eat it in the past, but it didn't stop him from complaining.

All in all, he'd concluded, John was a tolerable guy.

John, as you learned, was pretty much the most doting father in existence. He was also probably the most awkward adult man you have ever met. An intrusion by John was pretty much guaranteed whenever the two of you spent time at Karkat's house, hence why you spent more at your apartment. Your adoptive guardian (whom you simply referred to by name, because the two of you had agreed that the term 'father' didn't suit a man who made half his living off of a number of lucrative web-based businesses that catered to questionable consumers) was pretty cool about leaving the two of you be, despite the occasional intentionally embarrassing remark and his over-protective demeanor. Karkat doesn't like him, and the feeling is mutual, but they put up with each other for your sake.

Dave's not an intimidating a guy, once you get to know him- he's the coolest guy you know, in fact- and you think the two of them would get along, if they'd just get past their surface-impressions of one another. They share more in common than they know, have faced similar hardships, but none of their secrets are yours to tell. You've convinced Dave to give Karkat the benefit of the doubt, at least. A large part of that probably had to do with John. Interestingly enough, your respective guardians hit it off the moment they met. You guess they sort of balance each other out, in the perfect amount of cool-to-uncool ratio.

Your relationship thus far has been fairly smooth sailing, as far as relationships go. There are no shortage of arguments and problems to work out, but in the end you somehow manage to work through them. Predictably, the first time you fought, it was over something completely stupid. By stupid you mean Karkat being stupid.

You weren't a particularly popular person amongst your peers, and that wasn't a secret to anyone. You didn't really care what they thought of you. The insults thrown your way rolled like water off a duck's back; monikers like 'freak' and 'weirdo' were two of a long list of painstakingly acquired nicknames you had begun accumulating in elementary school.

So you were loud and obnoxious and unafraid of stating the truth, you were a tattle-tale and a liar and you liked to push people's buttons. You liked to taste things that oughtn't have been tasted. You can't say you hadn't done your part to earn half those names, sometimes consciously so, but to be honest, you had more fun hanging out with the social rejects anyway.

That day in the library, you had been deliberately antagonizing some of the more prominent jerkasses in your class who had some rather disrespectful opinions about your substitute teacher. Naturally, they retaliated with remarks of their own, and usually you'd laugh and leave it at that, but for some reason Karkat had decided your honor couldn't go undefended and the whole thing spiraled downward from there.

It wasn't the first time his sharp tongue had gotten him into trouble, but it was the first time it had on your account, and you couldn't help but feel somewhat responsible as you escorted his sorry ass to the nurse's office. At least he hadn't been the one to throw the punch- he wasn't about to be suspended- but he was certainly itching for a fight the moment they left school grounds. You did not approve. You were used to it, you said, you'd instigated it in the first place anyhow, why was it that you had to go and do that Karkat, it wasn't worth it, it didn't matter. He was stubborn, and you were stressed, and in the end you stormed off without walking the rest of the way home together, refusing to speak to him if he was so adamant about seeking revenge.

Sollux confronted you the morning following your weekend of cold-shouldering Karkat. "Did you and KK break up or thomething?" He asked you. You furrowed your brow and frowned. Sollux was the last person you'd have expected to ask such an absurd question. So you shook your head and told him, "No. We had a fight on friday over something dumb. Why'd you jump to that conclusion?"

When Sollux, of all people, started voicing concerns about your personal life, you knew you'd fucked up somewhere along the line. "Have you theen him all day?"

"No," You said with growing apprehension, "Not yet. Our only class together is sixth period."

Sollux hesitated, shook his head. "Maybe you thhould go find him."

You did. You checked his homeroom and you checked his locker, but you finally found him alone on the steps in the courtyard, and it occured to you that it might be he had been trying to avoid you. His back was to you and he looked as though he was absorbed in thought, so he jumped when you spoke.

"Karkat, did you think I wanted to break up with you?" You weren't angry- you couldn't find it in yourself to be angry. You were hurt and confused and a little scared that he might have taken one little spat and blown it out of proportion in that stupid way of his and assumed the worst. He rounded on you with wide eyes and swallowed hard, and you knew that you'd hit the nail on the head.

He looked like absolute shit, like he'd just rolled out of bed without having slept a wink. The bags under his suspiciously red-rimmed eyes were especially pronounced today, and the terribly distraught way he looked at you made your heart clench.

Then he was fumbling for words and making frenzied, pointless apologies and he didn't stop until you reached out and prodded him on the lips, leaning in close enough for your noses to bump. "Did you?" You repeated, because he pretty much ignored you the first time.

He pulled away and replied miserably, voice rough, "Don't you?"

You were simply stupefied.

"What? No. I mean I was sorta mad for a while but never that mad. Besides, it would be pretty dumb of me to break up with you over one little fight." You told him without bothering to hide your incredulity. When he continued to stare at you uncomprehendingly, your heart twisted a little more and you reached out and clasped his shoulders gently.

You cannot begin to fathom what it must feel like to be Karkat Vantas. A weaker heart would crumble under the weight of so much pain.

"No, dummy. I don't want to break up with you." You sighed, and to dispel any remaining uneasiness, you leant in and pressed a kiss to his forehead. "- And I still love you."

He's been better since then, and so have you. You learn from your mistakes. This entire relationship is trial and error for you both, and you've got more to grapple with than most couples do. You have a mutual understanding that you will both fuck up, and fuck up often. You accept this as fact and choose continue this uphill battle called love. That's as close to perfection as any relationship ever comes.

And yet... this is still the best thing that's ever happened to you in your short life. In truth, you'd likely feel the same regardless of who you were dating, because that's just what it's like to be in love. Still, you know how things work out in the real world, and you know it's a ridiculous notion to assume what you have now will last forever.

But things have been going well so far. And right now, the two of you are content to imagine it might.


End file.
